From engineers to ethical hackers

The claim that France’s Orange Group is the continent’s top security service provider to the mobile industry won credence with the news that its Cyberdefense subsidiary has created 800 new roles across the nine European countries in which it operates. In a recruitment campaign that will run until the end of 2023 it is recruiting expertise in a mission to create the largest community of cyber experts in Europe and to support the company’s rapid growth.

Cybersecurity expertise is becoming scarcer as customer demand rises, so Orange Cyberdefense is claims to making significant changes to its recruitment process. The most obvious is a widening of the talent search by diversifying the profiles of its employees. A new more efficient recruitment policy will support employee mobility between jobs in different countries. There are positions available across the entire organisation, from analysts through architects, engineers to ethical hackers. Consultancy is probably the most obvious area for diversification, since candidates need to be good listeners with empathy for society’s many different social groups. This latest recruitment drives comes as Orange Cyberdefense (OC) announced a 14% growth over the past financial year, including four acquisitions in four years. The average headcount of each office has risen 13% over the past two years and the 800 new professionals will join the 3,000 experts already employed the organization.

All abilities will be considered, from beginners with common sense to experts at master’s level. Talent will be sourced from engineering or business schools, universities, training in new technologies as well as IT, and the products of work-study programmes. In a statement, Orange said that ‘roles are available to those who want to work in the fast-paced and mission critical cybersecurity space’. In interviews, it will be advisable to name drop your passion for anticipating, identifying, protecting, detecting and responding to cyber threats. Orange Cyberdefense ended the last financial year with overall growth of 14% across its activities, achieving sales of €977 million, with a steady upward trajectory of revenues which have increased fivefold over the past 8 years.

Last year it hired 777 new experts but now it has created a single, global recruitment platform it hopes to widen the diversity of candidates it recruits. It has cyber campuses in countries as diverse as France, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium, and more mono-cultural populations such as Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland.  To achieve a wider outreach it is implementing measures to enrich professional and personal paths by simultaneously strengthening the gateways between the various jobs and the opportunities to identify the nature of the cyber threat as close as possible to its customers. The hunt for older and wiser security experts is reflected in the average age of its employees (35 years old) and the higher than usual proportion of women in an IT company. Around 20% of OC staff are female and it hopes that at least 25% of new hires will be. Its commitment to diversity goes beyond being a member of the Women4Cyber association, although that does at least formalise the process of promoting cybersecurity jobs to women through mentoring and tutoring sessions.

“Our goal is to create the largest community of cyber experts in Europe,” said Hugues Foulon, CEO of Orange Cyberdefense. “This is a huge challenge, especially with the talent shortage the whole industry is experiencing. We promise the professionals who choose to join us that they will be joining a very ambitious organization that has the resources to be the leader in its market and to offer extensive development opportunities to its employees.”